TRUCKEE — I grew up with the story of how my father almost died in an avalanche.

It was a vivid warning that always hung over my sisters and I as we fell in love with the mountains, just as my dad had, compelled by the adrenaline of powder days and the majesty of the peaks.

Last weekend, it finally led me to my first avalanche safety class in Truckee. I’m one of many. A surge of popularity has made back-country skiing one of the fastest-growing winter activities. I wanted to learn how to interpret the snow to be safer. And I was also looking to understand something deeper about people. What draws us into dangerous situations, even if we know better? And how can we resist it?

My dad, Vincent von Kaenel, was 14 when the avalanche buried him.

He was a member of an outdoors youth group in Switzerland, where he grew up. On Dec. 10, 1978, they set out for a ski tour on Engstligenalp, in the western Swiss Alps. There were 22 kids and seven trained adults. But they only had 23 avalanche beacons, which transmit or search for a radio signal in case of a burial. So some of the adults went without.

“That was the first mistake,” my dad always told us gravely.

Still, they all got out their skins, technology that prevents skiers from sliding down, and started hiking up. My dad remembers cracks in the snow shooting out left and right — a clear warning sign of instability in the snowpack — but they pressed on to a plateau studded with boulders. Next to him was an instructor he considered a good friend.

Then the ground started moving.

According to the incident report my dad requested years later, the break stretched half a mile wide and between 4 and 27 inches deep. The snow slid more than one and a half miles downhill, burying or partially burying 12 people. The report doesn’t detail my dad’s experience, but his vivid recollections have always stuck with me.

At first, he wasn’t scared. He just went through the motions he had just learned in an avalanche safety and rescue class. Stay afloat for as long as possible. When the snow slows down, punch a breathing hole in front of your face. Then wait.

Soon, he started hearing sounds above him: first the beeps of rescuers picking up his avalanche beacon, then the crunch of their boots and shovels. He thinks it was around 45 minutes later when they pulled him out.

Then, he learned that his instructor was also buried.

My father told the rescuers he had seen the missing man go down nearby. But he didn’t have a beacon, so the rescue team couldn’t locate him. Two hours after the slide, they finally dug him out, four feet underneath the surface. He was dead.

My dad — miraculously — had no injuries and returned home on the same bus as his friends.

“It all hit me the next day,” he said. “I was terrified.”

Others told him that the avalanche had carried him over a cliff without him noticing. His chances of survival had been less than 10 percent. He didn’t ski again for three years.

I’m glad he eventually picked it back up because he has given me his knowledge and passion for the sport. We always carry beacons.

Stories like my dad’s are not uncommon. They’re picked apart as case studies in avalanche safety classes. What was the weather like? What was the terrain? What were the warning signs?

My own American Institute for Avalanche Research and Education (AIARE) Level 1 class started in a small classroom in Tahoe Mountain Sports in Truckee. There were a dozen other students. We drew the different categories of avalanches — called “avalanche problems” — into our notebooks and looked at a slideshow of different snow crystals. There was a dizzying amount of new vocabulary.

The next day, we drove out to a parking lot near Donner Pass, a popular spot for back-country skiing, to practice. The highlight came when we dug a “snow pit” of a few feet. Recorded in the layers we uncovered were the season’s major storms and weather events.

Here, my guide showed, an icy crust had formed after rain, before being covered by fresh snow. A brownish line further down had previously been full of non-sticky crystals. That was called “persistent”, a weak layer deep in the snow-pack that can break into a particularly dangerous avalanche. A few weeks before, when the layer was at its weakest, a slide at a nearby ski resort, Alpine Meadows, killed a skier and injured another.

The snowpit made me feel like I had x-ray vision. The group agreed the snow looked strong, with little risk of breaking off. We got ready to ski down from the top of Donner Peak. I was itching to get some turns in.

Almost immediately, my skis got caught in a crust and I face-planted.

Only later did I recognize my error: I had misjudged the conditions and my ability. I should have started much slower. I had put myself at unnecessary risk of injury because I wanted to be seen by the group as a skilled skier.

Acceptance, or the desire to be respected, is one of the six heuristic traps back-country travelers can fall into, we soon learned.

The others are familiarity (the belief a skier knows the area and can avoid hazards); consistency (the commitment to achieve a goal); expert halo (the trust placed in a more knowledgeable or experienced skier); tracks/scarcity (the pressure to be the first to get in turns); and social facilitation (the tendency for people to go along with the group).

The terms were popularized by avalanche researcher Ian McCammon. He published landmark studies in the early 2000s showing that most avalanche victims, even the most well-trained, ignored clear hazards before getting buried.

In my dad’s case, the choice to travel without avalanche beacons and ignore clear warning signs was so egregiously wrong that the lead guide was later charged with negligent homicide and fined, according to the incident report.

The riskiest avalanche factor of all, it turns out, is the human one.

The industry is coming to grips with this. The “human factor” is increasingly part of official avalanche instruction in California, Max Wittenberg, my instructor, told me. Not only are we expected to learn snow science, but also how to plan different trip options to accommodate the terrain and conditions.

Teaching humility is not an easy task, he said.

“It’s much harder to walk away than to keep skiing,” explained Wittenberg. “It took me 10 years to recognize this. And I still catch myself getting into situations.”

Our chance to put it all into practice came the next day when we headed off to ski near Castle Peak, another popular spot. A southwest wind had picked up and clouds carrying snow rolled in. The Sierra Avalanche Center called the conditions firm and challenging, but did not forecast an avalanche problem.

My group — made up of five women split-boarders, Wittenberg and myself — stopped every quarter-hour or so to discuss the changing conditions. We quickly realized we would have to abandon our carefully built plans A — and B, and C. The snow was too hard. There was very little risk of an avalanche but there was a high risk of injury.

Instead, we talked, snacking in the protection of trees underneath the first main ridge, as big, round snow crystals accumulated on the ice around us. We took turns talking about our comfort levels and our preferences. We took a vote. Eventually, we decided to push on to the top of the ridge, but no further.

The other group in our class was made up of seven men. Later, one of them told me he had suggested they go to the top of the ridge, too, because the “girls were all going”. But he immediately got called out. It was a classic human risk factor. McCammon has found that men in mixed-gender groups were more likely to ignore hazards. Women, overall, were less likely to get caught in dangerous situations.

We all ended the day early. I was sad it was over so quickly — but also excited to be able to go back out again, soon.

Camille von Kaenel covers Camp Fire recovery. She is a corps member with Report for America, a national non-profit organization that helps fund local journalists. She's happy to be back hiking the hills and mountains of her home state of California.